The Sleeper (7 page)

I left the cybercafé at about three in the morning. The guns, groans, and splashes of gore were still echoing down the street. Above me I could see the Alhambra. Maybe it was the greatest achievement of Islam. I don't know. I didn't see it up close. But from where I was it looked like my idea of Alamut, the city where the Old Man of the Mountain lived in the Crusades, the place where he built a paradise and convinced his followers he held the key to it before sending them to spread terror all over the world and down through history.

 

The apartment blocks where Pilar and Bassam al-Shami had lived were brutally lonely late at night. One or two lights were on, but the main street and the alleys that led off it were dead silent. The only footsteps in the stairwell were mine. The turning of the key in the door echoed down the hall.

I was not sure what I was looking for on this second trip. Nothing had changed in the apartment since I left it. The curtains were still drawn. The little oriental carpet in the front hall was still crooked. The mess in the computer room was the same.

The box by the TV had a dozen or so videos in it, some in the cases, some not. I started popping them in the machine and fast forwarding. They weren't even from Hong Kong. Most looked like they were made in the Philippines. The only Bruce Lee was
Enter the Dragon.
But when I opened the case, the tape had no label.

A home movie: The first scene was a street scene where most of the people in the street were black. Men were dressed in short-sleeved shirts and, some of them, in ties. The camera seemed to be shooting aimlessly, like it was left on by accident. A couple of shop signs had the word “Nairobi” in them, so I guessed that's where we were. A blonde woman in a safari hat and shirt and khaki slacks was standing in a busy square. Behind her were a couple of skyscrapers and a low building. Africans walked in front of her and behind her and took no notice at all. Now she was standing across the street in front of a craft shop, with a bunch of carved giraffes on each side of her, waving. Now she was in another city street, waving again. I could see the same skyscraper again. Black glass front, white stone sides. A parking lot with a guard at the entrance. Another low building. Lots of cars. Lots of traffic noise. Lots of Africans in short-sleeved shirts with ties. A street vendor passes with a cart full of brilliantly colored fruit. The blonde woman in the safari hat is waving again. Same skyscraper and same low building in the background. She turns and looks at it and looks back at the camera and waves.

I rewound that section of the videotape. The woman waves, and turns, and behind her, flying above the low building, is the American flag. I rewound the whole tape and started it again. Every scene except the one with the giraffes shows the same low building. Now I see the guards around it more clearly. There is another scene of the parking lot, another shot of the guardhouse in front of it. In all of them, the blonde in the safari hat is laughing and waving. You can't hear what she's saying over the noise of the buses and cars, but she thinks the person behind the camera, who is saying nothing, is just the funniest person on earth. There was no time and date on the video. But I knew it must have been taken before August 1998. The building in the background was the American Embassy in Nairobi. On August 7, 1998, it was blown up by a hit team from Al-Qaeda.

The image turned to gray snow and I got up to look for a pen and some paper to make some notes. In the room with the computer I finally found the stub of a pencil and a yellowing envelope.

“Más lento. Muy, muy lentamente.”
The voice was coming from the living room. The doctor's voice. “
El cinturón.
” I could feel the hackles rise on the back of my bruised neck. The voice was on the tape.
“Primero, el cinturón.”

The video was still rolling. The blonde was in what looked like a big hotel room. The white curtains were drawn, but there was still a lot of light. She still wore her safari hat, and she was looking down at her waist, unbuttoning her safari shirt. Underneath she had a short, thin T-shirt that showed her navel and was tight against her heavy breasts. Something was written on it. Her stomach was flat, and she flexed the muscles a little for the camera. She unfastened the canvas belt, the
cinturón.

The woman was standing at the end of a bed and in the foreground I could see a man's naked legs. The right one was scarred and withered. “Give me the belt.” His hand reached out and she looked into the lens as she dangled it in front of him. Only then did I recognize her as Pilar.

She took off the safari shirt and dropped her pants to the floor, standing before the camera with her hands on her hips, wearing nothing but a thong, the hat, and the T-shirt. The logo across the front read “friendlyboy.” Now the hat came off. She shook her head. Her dyed blonde hair, thick and heavy as a mane, cascaded over her shoulders.

This was the woman who had shaken my hand so warmly, swung a steel bar so painfully, and died so quickly. The tape kept rolling.

She pulled off the T-shirt and the thong, and stood completely nude in front of the camera. There was not much tease, because there was no sense of modesty. She had the same kind of matter-of-fact confidence stark naked as she seemed to have when she was covered from head to foot. The muscles in her arms and stomach were all softly outlined. There was no hair on her body at all.

In a mirror behind her, I glimpsed the man who was filming. He had his shirt open, and no shorts and he was clearly aroused. But the camera blocked his face. Apart from his graying hair and trim salt-and-pepper beard, I couldn't tell much about his features.

“Put the camera on the desk,” he said. She took it from him, still running. Now I could see the whole bed, but the light from the picture windows behind it turned the man into a silhouette.

Pilar straddled him, rubbing herself against his groin even as she slid the belt around his waist and his hands and strapped down his arms. She rose up on her knees and he twisted himself beneath her until he was on his stomach. She kissed and bit his shoulders, the small of his back, working her way down his body. As she got nearer his ass, she put her hand between his legs and reached under him. Now her tongue was between his cheeks, lingering there. She was kissing his legs, running her tongue along the scars. She climbed down off the bed and began to run her tongue up and down his feet, his instep, his toes—and the tape ended.

“Wow,” I said to the empty apartment. “You are one sick son of a bitch. What the hell do you look like?”

I went over the parts of the tape again, where I thought I might be able to get a better look at his face. I played with the color and contrast. But the best image I had of him, when he was prostrate on the bed looking at the lens of the camera, was so badly shadowed and so full of ecstasy or horror or both that it was hard to know if I would ever be able to recognize it again.

 

The next morning I addressed the tape to Marcus Griffin, Government Office Building No. 2A, Langley, Virginia, with an unsigned note: “You're going to love this. Be sure you run the tape to the end. The woman is Pilar al-Shami, and she is dead. I think the man is Dr. Bassam al-Shami. He did ten years in Syria's Tadmor Prison. Probably part of the Islamic resistance. Now he sells honey. I am sure he knows where the sharks are swimming.”

I sent the cassette regular mail. That would give me some time.

Flies with red eyes the color of matchheads crawled across the map of Kenya on the wall of the Summit Vision Development Agency. The chart was covered with tiny brown spots, and near Lake Victoria in the west you couldn't really tell where the villages ended and the flyspecks began, but the danger zones in the east were clearly marked: entire provinces along the Somali border were shaded in black.

“Looks like you need a security escort in half the country,” I said. The secretary, who spoke with an Indian accent, said, “Mr. Faridoon will be receiving you shortly. Perhaps you would like to have a seat?”

“Thank you,” I said, and kept looking at the map. Even in peacetime nomads roamed the provinces near Somalia. But peace was a long time ago, and the wars had erased, redrawn, and erased again what there was of a border. Hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees were holed up near the town of Dadaab. There was drought and flood, hunger and famine—thousands of square miles of no-man's-land where any man could hide if he had the money, the guns, and the right God to protect him. In the middle of the blackened badlands were three little pins: the development agency's projects.

“Mr. Faridoon will see you,” said the secretary.

The man behind the large metal desk looked to be about forty, maybe a little older. He was clean-shaven, in a white shirt with long sleeves and a tie. His skin was olive, almost gray. He greeted me with a smile that was friendly but wary, like he was trying to place my face.

“I had a beard in the old days, in Bosnia,” I said. “And the old days were nine years ago.”

He looked at my eyes, then at my hands, and back into my eyes. “ ‘The Demolition Man!' ” he said.

“Is that what they called me?”

“That and ‘The American.' ”

“Yeah.”

“You
are
the one who blew up the Chetnik prison camp?

“Yeah.”

“Incredible. That was about the bravest thing I remember from those days. You saved a great many lives.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “that's ancient history.”

Mr. Faridoon looked at me and smiled. “History counts,” he said.

“So does the future,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes!” He shoved the papers on his desk aside like he was clearing a path between us. He gestured for me to sit down. “And what brings you here?”

“I always kind of wanted to see Africa,” I said. “My marriage—well, I had some personal problems and some time off. So I came.”

“That's it?”

“Came here on a wing and a prayer, I guess you'd say, and then I remembered you.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” I said. He knew I was lying. He just wanted to know why. “Yes,” I said again, “and while I'm here I thought maybe I could make myself useful.”

“I see,” said Mr. Faridoon. “You mean you want a job.”

“I mean, if you've got something for a few weeks or months, I'd be happy to help out, even as a volunteer.”

Mr. Faridoon laughed. “Do you even know what we do?”

I did not. And I did not know whose side they were on, either. When I saw this Faridoon and the Summit Vision Charitable Trust in Abu Seif's address book I wasn't absolutely sure that this was the man I remembered from Bosnia. There were so many charities in the Balkans, and so many people from so many places connected to them. Some were Saudi, some Iranian, and some were, I thought, a little more mysterious. This was an Ismaili charity, and in those days I had no idea who the Ismailis might be. I knew nothing about the ancient cult of the assassins, or the modern charities of the Aga Khans. All I knew was that they had a project in Bosnia to help distribute safe heating stoves, which might have given them good cover to bring in heavy metal objects: guns, RPGs, even mortars. And in those days, that's what I hoped they were doing. I remembered liking Faridoon. My gut and what I'd read about the Ismailis told me he could be friendly with the British services, or the Indians. Or playing on his own. Or a true doer of good deeds. Or none of the above. I laughed. “Not really, no, I don't know what you do.”

“I supposed not,” he said. “We build beehives, mostly. We're helping people who have nothing to develop a grass-roots economy into something. We don't have much call for a demolition man.”

“I've spent a lot of the last eight years as a carpenter.”

“Useful,” said Faridoon.

“And, of course, the other area where I might help is with security.”

“Security.” Faridoon sat back in his chair and shook his head, still smiling, thinking. “What precisely did you do after you left Bosnia? Did you just give up on the jihad?”

“After what I saw in Bosnia—after what I saw that night at the prison camp—yeah, I quit. I realized that kind of war was never going to solve anything. I went home. I settled down.”

“You're from the Midwest, I believe? I can tell by the accent, although I can't quite place it.”

“Kansas,” I said, a little impressed.

“Precisely.” He sat back. “Precisely.” His smile was not the easiest to read. “We learned many things in Bosnia, didn't we, Kurt?”

“Not enough to stop what happened on the eleventh.”

“If you could have stopped it, would you have stopped it?” He leaned forward. “Don't answer too quickly.”

“Yes.”

“I mean
then,
” he said. “Would you have stopped it if you could have back then? In Bosnia?” He listened to my silence, then went on. “Were you at the Ansar house in December 1992?”

“Yes.”

“That tall, gentle Arab who visited. So tall. So gentle. So rich, they said.”

“I saw him. Yes, from a distance, at night.”

“And you knew his name.”

“Osama.”

“And if you had known what he would do, then, would you have killed him then?”

“I was a different man—then.”

“Yes.” Faridoon sat back. “Yes. I think you were.” He nodded in answer to himself, and smiled. “What are you doing tomorrow morning?” said Faridoon. “I don't think I can use an employee, but maybe”—he seemed to search for the word—“a consultant.”

 

“Jump Start Restaurant, best burgers in Kansas, how can we help you?” Ruth, the other waitress, again.

I hung up and lay back in the king-size bed at the Nairobi Holiday Inn. God, I was tired. God, I was sore. God. The mini-bar beckoned, but there wasn't enough energy in me to get up. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what a cold beer tasted like. It hadn't been such a long time since I had one, but that was in Kansas. It was before that clear Tuesday morning in September when everything changed. How long ago was that? Three weeks? Just a little less than three weeks. And I had the beer on…the Sunday before the Tuesday. We went with Miriam on a picnic up by the lake. There were trails up there that weren't too crowded, even on a Sunday, and years ago Betsy and I found a little stand of trees right by the water that felt like it was all ours, and usually was. We started taking Miriam up there when she was less than a year old, and now she showed us the way. That Sunday we ate Betsy's deviled eggs and fried chicken and potato salad, and I washed it all down with a Coors Light from the cooler, so cold it tasted like spring water. Ah, God.

“Jump Start Restaurant, best burgers in Kansas, how can we help you?” Ruth, again. I hung up, again.

I picked up a copy of
Kenya Life Monthly
from the bedside table and leafed through photographs of celebrities who came to the country to take safaris or donate money. Former President George H. W. Bush was among them, alongside the Aga Khan, at the opening of a cultural center in Mombasa. Caught in the camera flash, the old Bush looked almost like I remembered him from the Kuwait war, dignified but a little confused. The Aga Khan stood beside him, full of confidence, with a smile as comfortable as old money. The Ismaili faithful used to offer their leader his weight in gold. That was one of the things you always read about them; there were so many stories and myths. But the Ismailis were something else today. Quiet. Present. Taking care of themselves, defending their vision of their faith. They didn't have scales, they had portfolios.

The Old Man of the Mountain was long behind them. His fortress of Alamut was overrun by the Mongols, and his followers became just another minor, persecuted bunch of believers in Persia—until the British thought they might be useful, and moved them to India during the Raj. The British always liked to work with minorities who relied on them for protection. In India the Ismailis didn't have any friend but the Crown, and they served it well, and it served them, for more than a hundred years. Ismailis spread all over the Empire, from the jungles of Uganda to the most remote mountains of northwest Pakistan. Since the Empire ended, they stood on their own, and served their own interests, whatever those might be. The Aga Khans became playboys, and philanthropists, and hung out with ex-Presidents. But why was Faridoon's number in Abu Seif's computer?

I turned off the light and fumbled for the remote control, clicked on the TV, and zapped through the channels to CNN. The present President Bush was on the screen. “The battle is joined,” he said.